He thought of the drab days at the Military Academy, remembered the bitter evenings spent studying when he would hear out in the streets people passing who were free and presumably happy; the winter reveilles in the icy barrack rooms, where the threat of punishment hung low.

The bitterness of leaving for the first time the old house, where he had been born to hope, the fears which every change brings with it, the emotion at saying goodbye to his mother, did, to be sure, fill his heart; but all this was overshadowed by an insistent thought he couldn't lay his tongue to, like a vague foreboding, as if he were about to set out on a journey of no return.

"Do you see that grassy hill? Yes, that one. Do you see a building on top of it?" He went on. "That's already a piece of the Fort, an outwork. I passed it two years ago, I remember, with my uncle, when we were going hunting."

Giovanni and Francesco were friends, having lived together for years on end, with the same passions, the same friendships; they had seen each other every day, then Vescovi had got fat but Drogo had become an officer and now perceived how distant the other was.

His horse and Francesco's - it seemed to him - had a different gait already, a stamping, his, less light and spirited, as if burdened with anxiety and fatigue, as if even the animal felt that life was about to change.

He saw his house in the distance. He made out the window of his room. Probably the panes were open, the women were tiding up. They would unmake the bed; shut things up in a wardrobe and then bar the shutters.

His mother would keep it thus so that on his return he could find himself again there, so that he could still be a boy in there, even after his long absence; why, surely she nurtured the illusion that she could keep intact a happiness which was forever gone, hold back the flight of time, that once the doors and windows were reopened upon her son's return things would be as before.

At a certain moment they are in fact level with Drogo on the opposite side of the ravine, seem for a moment to slacken pace, as if not to discourage him, then glide up the slopes and over the boulders; the horseman is left below.

All the valley was already brimful of violet shadows, only the bare grassy crests, incredibly high up, were lit by the sun when suddenly Drogo found before him, black and gigantic against the clearest evening sky, what seemed a military construction with an ancient and deserted look.

In a chink in the nearby crags, already shrouded in darkness, behind a chaotic up-and-down of crests, at an incalculable distance, still immersed in the red light of the sunset, as if sprung from an alchemy, Giovanni Drogo saw then a bare hill and on the edge of it a regular and geometric strip, of a peculiar yellowish color: the silouhette of the Fort.